There was no failure of intelligence: US spies were ignored,
or worse, they failed to make the case for war

The Guardian (London)

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday February 5, 2004
The Guardian

Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass
destruction last June, David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, told friends
that he expected promptly to locate the cause of the pre-emptive war. On January
28, Kay appeared before the Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. "It
turns out that we were all wrong," he said. President Bush, he added helpfully,
was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions
that turned out to be false.
Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a commission to
investigate; significantly, it would report its findings only after the presidential
election.

Kay's testimony was the catalyst for this u-turn, but only one of his claims
is correct: that he was wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community
did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden
and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush administration
in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from
individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were
kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war
resolution.

Precisely because of the qualms the administration encountered, it created
a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, located within
the Pentagon and under the control of neo-conservatives. The OSP roamed outside
the ordinary inter-agency process, stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi
exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding
them to the president.

At the same time, constant pressure was applied to the intelligence agencies
to force their compliance. In one case, a senior intelligence officer who refused
to buckle under was removed.

Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence
Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in
a nuclear weapons programme and had renewed production of chemical weapons,
the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human
intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle "told [the Bush administration] that
the way they were handling evidence was wrong." The response was not simply
to remove Hardcastle from his post: "They did away with his job,"
Lang says. "They wanted only liaison officers ... not a senior intelligence
person who argued with them."

When the state department's bureau of intelligence and research (INR) submitted
reports which did not support the administration's case - saying, for example,
that the aluminum tubes Saddam possessed were for conventional rocketry, not
nuclear weapons (a report corroborated by department of energy analysts), or
that mobile laboratories were not for WMDs, or that the story about Saddam seeking
uranium in Niger was bogus, or that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaida
(a report backed by the CIA) - its analyses were shunted aside. Greg Thielman,
chief of the INR at the time, told me: "Everyone in the intelligence community
knew that the White House couldn't care less about any information suggesting
that there were no WMDs or that the UN inspectors were very effective."

When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the Saddam/al-Qaida
connection, its reports were ignored and direct pressure applied. In October
2002, the White House inserted mention of the uranium into a speech Bush was
to deliver, but the CIA objected and it was excised. Three months later, it
reappeared in his state of the union address. National security adviser Condoleezza
Rice claimed never to have seen the original CIA memo and deputy national security
adviser Stephen Hadley said he had forgotten about it.

Never before had any senior White House official physically intruded into CIA's
Langley headquarters to argue with mid-level managers and analysts about unfinished
work. But twice vice president Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, came
to offer their opinions. According to Patrick Lang: "They looked disapproving,
questioned the reports and left an impression of what you're supposed to do.
They would say: 'you haven't looked at the evidence'. The answer would be, those
reports [from Iraqi exiles] aren't valid. The analysts would be told, you should
look at this again'. Finally, people gave up. You learn not to contradict them."

The CIA had visitors too, according to Ray McGovern, former CIA chief for the
Middle East. Newt Gingrich came, and Condi Rice, and as for Cheney, "he
likes the soup in the CIA cafeteria," McGovern jokes.

Meanwhile, senior intelligence officers were kept in the dark about the OSP.
"I didn't know about its existence," said Thielman. "They were
cherry picking intelligence and packaging it for Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
to take to the president. That's the kind of rogue operation that peer review
is intended to prevent."

CIA director George Tenet, for his part, opted to become a political advocate
for Bush's brief rather than a protector of the intelligence community. On the
eve of the congressional debate, in a crammed three-week period, the agency
wrote a 90-page national intelligence estimate justifying the administration's
position on WMDs and scrubbed of all dissent. Once the document was declassifed
after the war it became known that it contained 40 caveats - including 15 uses
of "probably", all of which had been removed from the previously published
version. Tenet further ingratiated himself by remaining silent about the OSP.
"That's totally unacceptable for a CIA director," said Thielman.

On February 5 2003, Colin Powell presented evidence of WMDs before the UN.
Cheney and Libby had tried to inject material from Iraqi exiles and the OSP
into his presentation, but Powell rejected most of it. Yet, for the most important
speech of his career, he refused to allow the presence of any analysts from
his own intelligence agency. "He didn't have anyone from INR near him,"
said Thielman. "Powell wanted to sell a rotten fish. He had decided there
was no way to avoid war. His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as
we could scrape up."

Powell ignored INR analysts' comments on his speech. Almost every piece of
evidence he unveiled turned out later to be false.

This week, when Bush announced he would appoint an investigative commission,
Powell offered a limited mea culpa at a meeting at the Washington Post. He said
that if only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an invasion.
Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to distance himself from
other members of the administration and especially Cheney. Powell also defended
his UN speech, claiming "it reflected the best judgments of all of the
intelligence agencies".

Powell is sensitive to the slightest political winds, especially if they might
affect his reputation. If he is a bellwether, will it soon be that every man
must save himself?

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior advisor to President Clinton, and
author of The Clinton Wars.